The Camden journal. [volume] (Camden, S.C.) 1866-1891, 1887-03-10
AFTER NIGHT THE DAWN.

The door of the country scbool-room
closed behind the last noisy pupil, and
the young teacher was alone. She
bowed her head wearily upon her hand,
and looked around the bare, comfortless
room, with its hard benches, curtainless
windows, and rusty, broken stove, with
shudder Of d sgust.
There were days-and this had been
one-.when every Eber of her sensitive
being shrank from association with the
motley crowd of urchins, and from con-
tact with the dirty, dog's-eared books,
the grimy desks, and dingy walls; but
she never allowed these feelings to in
fuence her; the duties of her position
were conscicntiously performed. the
more so, perhaps, because they were so
disagreeable.
She had dismissed school an hour
earlier to-day, ostensibly to enable her to
correct the CO npositions banded in for
to-morrow's reading; really because she
had seen Roy Carlton drive by, and
knew that he would return to ask her
company for an hours drive behind his
handsome bays; and she had told her
refuse. henceforth and forever, all things
that he might ask of her; and she
wished to have little time to strengthen
herself. to 'have her dark hour unseen,"
before she should shut the gate forever
between that world of ease and happi-
ness, and, more than all else, of Roy's
love, and her werld of poverty, loneli-
ness and SORROW
She could not help but love him, he
had laid so many drifts of sunshine
across her otherwise shadowed pathway,
had been such a rock Of refuge in her
desert of friendlessneSs, since she came,
over year ago, to this dreary little viii
lage to earn her living by teaching.
She had not chosen this vocation, not
because she lik i it, for she did not, but
because she felt that she was prepared
for it, and there seemed to be no place
for her elsewhere in the ranks of work
ers.
She was not fitted to do battle with the
grim iend of poverty; she had, until
two years before, "fed on the roses, and
lain in the lilies of life" Then came
the death of her father, followed almost
Immediately by that of her mother, and
she wa. lEft unprepared to face the,world
alone.
Her fathers wealth, which she always
supposed from their style of living to be
ample, faded away before the demands
of his creditors like snow in the spring
time. Her high sense of honor would
not allow her to hold back even the old
homestead and household furniture, 20
dear from the associations clustering
around it, and reserving but one or two
orticles, she allowed the rest, even her
piano, to be sold.
Her summer friends drifted away one
BY one, and she noted their departure
with scarcely sigh over their defect on.
Was it because she realized of how little
worth wa; their evanesccnt friendship
or had her heart, suffering a deeper
wound, become dead to the smartlng of
these lesser hurts?
Harry Vance had been her ideal Of
gentleman. She had cherished for him
q strong friendship, which, before her
fathers death, had hidden fair to ripen
into love; his attentions had been very
lover-like, and this small world in which
the two moved had already, in imagina-
tion, coupled their names together, when
the clouds of misfortune shrouded her;
and he, with some trite sentences of con-
dolence upon his tongue, had stepped
nimbly out Of their shadow, probably
congratulating himself that he had not
gone so far but what it was still easy to
recede.
She sighed, not for him, but for her
shattered ideal, when she saw that he
sought out shallow, brainless favorite
Of fortune, and sought 10y vigorous
courtship to obtain her hand in marriage,
and possession of the property he knew
she held in her own right, and in that
sigh e>haled the last lingering perfume
of the friendship Ellice Gray had felt,
not for Harry Vance, but for the man she
had imagined himsto be; and in its place
grew loa.hing aud contempt for Harry.
Vance, the fortune hunter. intensified an
hundred fold:>= ben, later, she heard of
the debts and |Nuns that harrasscd his
pathway. D6r, strictly upright and hon
orable heSelf. she could tolerate no dis
honeStyln others, ard in her vocabulary
tf1effs-and debt without means or inten-
tion of payment were synonymous terms.
"NIany heart is caught in the re.
bound proved true in this case, for FL
lice had came to this little village to lose
the heart that had never really been in
Harry's keeping.
She knew Roy would ask her to be his
wife. and she had allowed herself to
dream of how happy she could BE- with
him; with what blessed sense of rest
and peace she could creep into the shell
ter OF his manly arms and lay her head
upon his loving breast. But now the
awakening had come, and the dream was
over. She had loved him so entirely for
himself, for that great, generous heart of
his, that seemed lar-e enough to take in
all mankind as brothers, that she had
not once thought of the difference in
their C rcumstances, for he was rich as
she was poor.
Now she had heard her name coupled
with the obnoxious terms "adventuress"
and fortune hunter" and the prophecy
that "lf Mr.. Carlton marri d her he
would soon know, as did all others, that
it was his wealth that won her."
She did not know that the remark had